


Redemption is a Journey

by rivendellrose



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Alien Sex, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 18:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9136465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivendellrose/pseuds/rivendellrose
Summary: Assumes some background from my earlier ficShadows of the Past.Alone in exile, Lennier finds comfort in the words of Dukhat, Delenn's teacher, and eventually finds his way back to Delenn.





	

In the months and years after he left her side, Lennier worried many times that Delenn would think he had intentionally stolen the papers that she had given him for safe-keeping. Had he remembered them, tucked away in a secret pocket in the breast of his robes, he assured himself that he would have taken the time to leave them behind. Even if it had meant being caught, it would have been worthwhile to see them left safely behind. The words of Dukhat, the greatest Minbari truly born to their people, deserved better than to be carried in dark places by a traitor, and Delenn’s part in the correspondence would surely be no less important to history.

He thought many times about sending them back to Minbar via courier, but that would require announcing his presence and identity to the rangers, or risking the documents’ safety with an untrustworthy messenger. When the time came, he told himself, he would turn the papers over to another’s hand and send them back to Delenn. Until then, he could uphold at least this small reminder of his former duties.

Even before he left Babylon 5 to train as a ranger he had begun reading the letters and had appreciated the wisdom he saw within, but now they took on the quality of scripture in his heart. Alone in the darkness, he traced his fingertips over Delenn’s familiar script, reading over and over her words of devotion to her mentor. At times he saw in those pages an echo of the same love that had eaten away the strength in his heart. And because it hurt too much to think of Delenn’s strength and how he had failed her, he folded the letters and hid them away again.

Time passed. Months of exile turned into a year, then two years, and strange stars wheeled over his head with each new night. And one cold day on an unknown planet not far from Centauri space, he found himself huddled under an outcropping of rock, cold, hungry, and miserable. He pulled his cloak tightly around himself, though it was growing so thin now that it did little good, and looking at it reminded him of Marcus. The color, the cloth worn and tired... and he remembered another night where he had been frustrated and exhausted into honesty at the ranger’s side. 

“I think,” he told the air beside him, “that you took the easier path.” 

The calling of his heart had been to Delenn’s side, always, as he had sworn. He would gladly have died for her - would happily have lain at her side and cut open his veins, if that was needed, watched his blood flow away, and died peacefully knowing that he had served her to his last breath. And yet that devotion had led him to shame, dishonor, to be a bearer of false evidence, and nearly to murder. Marcus had been right about the danger he courted by his feelings for her, but what heart could refuse its true calling?

“Perhaps I was meant for this,” he told the rocks around him, “as Delenn was meant for the Grey Council and the war against the Shadows. And for Sheridan.” It took more effort to speak aloud, but it was the only way to keep his mind clear. “Perhaps I was born for this purpose alone. To serve at her need, and then...”

Morden _had_ said that he would die soon, when they spoke several years before. And when he left, who would miss him? His body was far from home - none would find it until only bones remained, if then. There would be no funeral pyre, no one to speak the ancient prayers and watch over his body as it turned to soft, grey ash. His family was almost all dead, now, anyway, and his clan had been scandalized by his decision to remain with Delenn after her change. Perhaps they would have forgiven him now that she was _Entil’zha_ and helped to lead the new alliance, but most likely not. She was no longer Minbari, to their minds, and when he had refused to turn his back on her, they accepted his decision and included him in their censure. If he were dying at the gate of his clan’s home temple, he doubted that any of them would carry him within to perform the last rituals. He was unknown to them now. 

And Delenn? She would mourn him when she heard - _if_ she heard, if there was ever a way for word to come back to her that his shame had finally passed from this life - but she might also secretly feel grateful. No more embarrassment over love that came unasked-for. No more anger at his betrayal, or horror and disgust at what he had attempted against her husband. No more guilt, if that was what she felt, knowing that he had witnessed her worst moments and still been willing to lay his head on the stones and love a murderess, an orderer of genocide. She saw this in herself, he knew, and could not understand his willingness to forgive. And Sheridan, who knew none of this, would comfort her with soft words, sweet and certain and so very Human, and tell her that surely her aide had been unwell. Had been broken, wrong in the head, Shadow-touched... and would be better off dead than threatening more lives with his madness. In time, she would accept, put aside sorrow, and forget.

_I have nothing. I am nothing. Let me die, then - I have fulfilled my purpose here._

He curled in on himself, lost in despair and self-pity... and something crinkled against his chest. The letters. The words of the greatest native leader Minbar had ever known, written by his own hand to his beloved acolyte. They would perish here, rotting among the cold stones under dark, alien skies. 

_One more failure_ , he told himself. _It doesn’t matter._ But Lennier had been trained well in the temple. From the first day he knelt at the foot of a teacher, barely old enough to understand the words of a child’s prayers, he had learned that history was sacred. That the written word must not be carelessly destroyed. It _did_ matter. Delenn had entrusted these letters to him for safe-keeping and he, unknowingly, had stolen them away. These words belonged to all of Minbar. 

There was little else to do but to live. To find some way to go on, and eventually bring them back to Minbar. To her. He scrunched back against the rock outcrop, pulled the packet of letters from his robes, and began to read. The familiar pangs tore at him as he saw Delenn’s writing, hearing her voice behind the words, but this time he found himself looking more closely at the powerful words that she herself had and learned from. In the words of his teacher’s teacher, he found something that made his shoulders relax, made his head clear, made the hunger in the pit of his stomach seem a bit more distant.

He read until sunset came, slept until the first pale light of dawn, and began again.

 

* Twenty Years Later *

In the years after John’s death, Delenn began slowly to doubt whether Lennier would return. Susan kept watch when she went out on patrol, and quietly kept the search alive among those she led, but the rangers heard nothing of their former brother. Given the many conflicts that had absorbed the universe in his absence, it became harder to believe that he still lived and yet had not returned to her. Every night, Delenn remembered him in her prayers and lit a candle to help him find his way, but he was no longer the first thought on her mind when the door chimed or when Susan called to consult her on some matter of the _anla’shok._

And then, one afternoon when she lifted her head from her usual meditation out in the garden, he was simply there, sitting a respectful distance away, lost in quiet prayer as though he done this every day these last twenty-three years. But surely she was mistaken? This was perhaps a relative of Lennier’s, one who bore a strong resemblance, yes, but... 

“Le... Lennier?”

His eyes remained closed for a moment, and she thought she saw a tightening around his lips, as though he was afraid to confront her after all this time, and then he lifted his head and opened his eyes. The same Lennier, after all the time they had been apart - the same dark gaze with depths she had never quite understood, the same humble, faint smile playing at the edges of his lips. “Delenn,” he replied, and bowed his head again, as though that answered everything. 

She knelt in front of him and touched his cheek, ran her fingers over the peaked ridges of his crest, and forced herself to appreciate all the ways that he had changed, the details that had made her doubt this familiar form. The soft-faced youth she remembered, bright and fresh from the temple, had hardened into a man well-acquainted with the universe and its trials. His jaw seemed sharper, now, his cheeks hollowed somewhat by care and hunger, and the smooth lines of his headcrest had heightened into a more martial, masculine shape. Scars mapped his skin - not only the ones she had seen during his training, but more, and more dangerous, including one that passed close to his left eye and seemed to have been healed only within the last few years, from its color.

“I was not sure that you would come back, old friend,” she whispered tenderly, smoothing her thumb over the waxy shine of the scar. “After so long, I was afraid...”

“I told you that I was sure we would see each other again.” He offered that faint smile again, and covered her hand gently with his. “Forgive me, for taking so long to uphold my oath. There were... many things to do.”

“All this time, Lennier... where have you been? I worried so much for you...”

“I wandered for a long time,” he told her. “I saw many worlds, and lived in many places doing many kinds of work... and I studied the words of _Aten Satai_ Dukhat.” He pulled the packet of letters from his robes and set them with reverential care on her knee. “Not long ago, I knew that it was time... that I had to bring them back to you.”

 _Aten Satai_. ‘Deceased master.’ Delenn laid her hand on the papers. _Here we stand again, Dukhat and I and Lennier. As it should always have been. How different would our lives have been if Dukhat had lived, if in times of uncertainty and confusion I could have sent Lennier to seek his wisdom? So much sorrow could have been avoided..._ She shook off that thought - it was best not to spend time on might-have-beens. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I found that forgiveness and worth do not come from wandering alone, doing nothing to serve the universe.” He answered simply, as though this wisdom had not cost him the twenty years of pain she saw written in scars across his skin. “And so I found new ways to work, and to be useful. And in that way... yes. I found what I was looking for.” 

“I’m proud, Lennier. And so grateful to have you back,” she added, catching hold of his right hand and pressing it to her heart. “I’ve missed you. So very much.” 

He bowed his head again, and for a moment she saw again the distance he’d projected between them in the months before he disappeared. “I am sorry for that, Delenn. I never intended to hurt you. I misunderstood many things in those days, but after what happened on the White Star... after what I nearly did to President Sheridan, I realized that I could not stay. Had I remained, I cannot say what might have happened.”

“We might have talked. We might have found ways for the three of us to live together, or at least part on better terms.” Lennier began to protest, probably to take the blame on himself, but Delenn raised her hand for silence. “ _I_ might have insisted on this, before our silence went too far. The responsibility is mine. I never understood your feelings until our discussion after Marcus’ death, and after that... as much as I wanted to talk to you about what was happening, I wished also to spare your feelings. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I was ashamed of the pain I caused you by my choices.”

“You could not have chosen otherwise.” 

She shook her head. “I could have been more considerate of your feelings. Time among the humans has taught me that. We Minbari are perhaps too willing to bow our heads to what ‘must’ be.”

“I did not come here to upset you, Delenn.” Lennier sat back, folding his hands into the sleeves of his robes. “My time alone has been good for my soul, I think. If only for that, you did right. The more difficult path...”

“Leads often to a more worthy outcome.” She smiled, remembering those words from one of Dukhat’s last letters to her just before she was accepted into the Grey Council. “I’m glad you found peace in his words, Lennier. They’ve always comforted me... I only wish you could have met him while he was still alive.”

“I feel as though I have, through his words. And through you. You are much like him, I think.”

“At times, perhaps.”

So many words rushed to her mind, now that he was back. She wanted to tell him that she had prayed always for his safety, that the morning of David’s naming ceremony she had walked alone and wished for his soothing presence at her side - the temple guardians had never accepted John’s presence in their most holy places. That in the five years since John died, she had felt so alone that even David had begun to hint that his mother might perhaps want to meet new friends to share the last years of her life, and that she had always resisted out of hope that he would eventually return to take that place in her life. That he had been forgiven a thousand times over. That he was loved. 

It was not the same love she’d felt for John. That love had come to her like a revelation, a force of the universe itself that she could neither deny nor stay in its course. Nor the same as for David, for whom her love had been as natural as taking a breath, the need to protect and guard this tiny spark that had been entrusted to her, and that miraculously grew into an adult, overnight and in the times when she wasn’t watching. Not the same as the warmth she felt for Susan, Franklin, Vir, or even her other friends among her own people. She had not felt the same for Mayan, nor for Branmer, Neroon, or Dukhat when they were still alive. And yet she did love him, and she wondered how their story would have changed if she had found a way to tell him as much twenty-five years ago.

All of this she wanted to tell him, and a thousand other thoughts for which she couldn’t yet find words. But before she could begin, Lennier stood and held out his hand to help her up. “It’s cold,” he said simply. “You shouldn’t stay outside.”

She let him lead her into the house and brew her tea, and smiled when he moved without asking to make her breakfast. It seemed suddenly as though very little had really changed. 

* * *

Everything, Lennier thought, was different now. In the past times he’d spent with Delenn, there had been constant work to fill his days, endless paperwork and scheduling. Requests to filter and arrange in order of importance. Meetings and conferences to organize, to plan and to prepare for so that the menial parts of her work would be done before she was aware that they existed. Others did these chores, now - the president of the interstellar alliance had a small legion of aides and secretaries, guards and cooks to do the tasks that had once occupied his day. 

He tried not to feel useless and replaced. He had his own work to do, duties and responsibilities to their people, and had given up his place as her aide. But he had never thought of that decision as giving up his place with _her_... only delaying until such a time as he could be by her side again without shame and fear for his own traitorous thoughts.

That, at least, was a change for which he was grateful. He was older, now, and used to the pain of thinking of her, of waking from dreams where she smiled and forgave him, waking into a universe where she was far away, and where he had often doubted that he would ever see her again. Seeing her made the wanting worse, but it also relieved him of the pain that he’d felt every day when he wondered where she was, whether she was safe and happy, whether there was anyone to watch her as carefully as he had, to make sure that she ate and slept when she was working, to ensure she didn’t try to do everything alone. To love her, after he’d heard that Sheridan had died. It had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed not to return to her the instant the news came to his attention, but he had not yet been ready. There had still been too much to do. He had thought, after that, that it would be easy to see her once again. What greater denial could exist than refusing to fly to her side as soon as he was able?

And yet.

She smiled at him when they met for prayers in the morning, after her private sunrise contemplation. She touched his shoulder when she stood. Her hand lingered on his when he handed her a cup of tea. Or perhaps he imagined all of this, letting the force of a lifetime of dreams and desire lead his mind astray. That thought worried him. 

_I would never hurt her, or push beyond what she desires_ , he reminded himself. _Never. I would sooner die than cause Delenn pain._ And it was true. But he hadn’t ever planned to hurt Sheridan, either. If madness took him again, in a fit of jealousy...

She smiled again, and he returned the smile, and tried not to wince when she touched his cheek with the same tender affection as in the past. He was different now. But Delenn, despite the changes time had wrought, was the same as ever.

He sat by her side in meetings, sometimes - she had introduced him to her staff and associates as an old friend and advisor returned from a long journey, and everyone accepted him with the grace and politeness he expected they would accord to any friend of hers. And yet, he felt ashamed to sit beside her and do nothing, to have no purpose in her life. Every time he saw her look for a document, or heard a strain in her voice that indicated a glass of water would be welcome, he felt a twinge of frustration when a young aide stepped up before he could go to this task. 

“Peace, Lennier,” Delenn laughed one evening after he’d made yet another awkward attempt to rise, planning to retrieve a blanket for her, only to have a sweet-faced young acolyte bring one to her before he’d gotten to his feet. “I will not have my guest act the servant in my home. You are here as my friend, now, not my aide. Rest.”

“I feel foolish,” he admitted, settling back into the strange, Terran-styled chair across from her. “I feel... I do not know my place here.”

“Your place is with me,” Delenn answered, and he wondered at her confidence, her surety of position. The certainty in her voice and eyes washed away every doubt that had crept into his soul, and he remembered with a new clarity what joy had come to his heart the first time he’d looked at her. She was so changed from that day, now, but her spirit still flooded through him like a light that pushed aside all else. And yet... was that because it was truly his place to stand at her side, or because he had always _wanted_ that to be the case? 

“Is it?” he asked, perhaps only to prove that he was old enough, confident enough now to doubt her from time to time. “I thought that once, and found it very wrong.”

“It has always been true,” she assured him, and he smiled to remember that this was a woman who had looked in the face of temptation, who had directed armies with her whim and stood in the center of the Grey Council. It was not in Delenn’s soul to doubt, and his soul whispered that whatever she said must be, if not true, then at least enough for him. “I understand why you left,” she continued, “but... it gives me pleasure beyond words to have you here again. Come - sit with me.” She patted the couch beside her, and moved aside the blanket that was wrapped around her shoulders, indicating he should share it. “We have been too busy with work since you arrived. We have hardly had a moment alone.”

This, he realized, was the moment he had been fearing, intently and with a terror that nearly overwhelmed him. To be alone with her, yes, that was familiar. He knew how to handle that. To be near her, even - to pray at her side, to sit with her during long meetings, and to bring her tea in the evening while she went over paperwork and reports. All of this, he knew, and old habits could guide him through without thought if need be. But the couch she sat on now was small. There was barely room for two on it... and that only if they were quite close. 

“Lennier. Come here. Please.”

He couldn’t refuse her - that was the one thing he had never learned to do, in all his years both with her and without. He rose without speaking and crossed the distance between them, then hesitated. Delenn took his hand, and pulled him down to sit beside her. The side her thigh pressed up against him, and he closed his eyes for an instant, and swallowed. 

“There.” The smile in her voice, the contented tone of an argument won, was unmistakable to one who had seen her rejoice over so many councils swayed to her way of thinking. “Is this so bad?”

“You know that is not how I feel.” He hadn’t meant to snap at her, but some anger did reach his voice, and he pulled against her grip on his hand, trying to get up and away from all of this. This was temptation beyond what he could endure. It was one thing to steel himself against dreams now long become familiar. One thing to see her daily, to do for her again all the chores that had once filled his life and heart. But this... this intimacy tried his hard-won distance, and found it wanting.

“Forgive me, Lennier, please. I did not mean...” Delenn bowed her head, then lifted it again and looked at him with a painful honesty in her eyes. “That was a foolish thing to say. I have missed you so. Please - I am so grateful to have you here with me again.”

And he believed her. Against everything he had told himself for twenty-nine years, for the four years he’d been with her and all the twenty-five since then, he let her pull him gently back down onto the couch and against her, and she tucked her hand in the crook of his arm, and laid her head on his shoulder, the blanket draped over half her body. She sighed, her breath touching his cheek with heat. And he, feeling like a cursed, blessed, dreaming fool, leaned his cheek against her soft hair, closed his eyes, and let the moment overtake him completely. After all the nights he had spent alone and cold, wishing only to see her again, it was worth any amount of pain to feel her pressed against his side, and know that she felt safe there. 

He never had learned to deny her anything, no matter how it tore at his heart to give it. It seemed that it was too late to begin now.

* * *

The first time Delenn kissed Lennier, it surprised even her. 

He brought her tea in the evening, a week after he arrived at the house, and sat awkwardly at her side on the earth-style couch. “Delenn... I have been thinking. I cannot stay here. There is no place for me, no need... and there is work to do elsewhere. I wanted you to know. I will come back, if ever you need me, but for now...”

He trailed off, and he sounded in that moment as young as she had always remembered him, as young as he’d been all those years ago when he first came to Babylon 5. _I should never have let him leave_ , she thought. Should never have let him go off alone into the cold and the dark as he had so often prevented her from doing - should have followed him, as he had always done for her, but she had been distracted by the alliance and by Sheridan and the fragile new life growing deep within her. He tried to hide the scars from those many years, to keep her from seeing the pain it must have caused him to be alone for so long, but she knew him too well. She _could_ not let him leave again. Not now, not so soon after finally getting him back.

“We can find work for you here,” she told him. “What would you like to do?”

“That is not... Delenn.” He stopped her hand, which she had just raised to touch his arm. “You know why I must leave.”

“Because you still have feelings for me.” The old pang of shame still twinged in her when she said it, but Lennier didn’t so much as flinch. 

“Yes. It is not right.”

There were words for this, she knew, and an accomplished diplomat should have been able to find them. But in that moment, she could think of nothing to say, no words that would express her feelings. Her love for him, and the loneliness that threatened to press down on her at the thought of his leaving again, of endless years with no one who understood her as completely as he did, all weighed too heavily on her chest for speech to be possible. And so, she kissed him.

He tried to pull back, at first, and she caught the base of his crest in her hand and held him steady. And then he broke against her like ice shattering to release the waters underneath. He returned the kiss with twenty-nine years of repressed desire. 

“Don’t leave,” Delenn whispered against his cheek when they parted for breath. 

“There is...” He gasped, his eyes fluttering closed as she kissed the tiny shell of his ear. “There is no place for me here,” he finished. “Nothing that you need from me...”

“You are no longer my aide, that’s true.” She traced the patterns of his headcrest and watched emotions pass like spring’s swift-changing clouds over his face. “But to say there is nothing that I need from you... No, Lennier. That I cannot accept. You promised me once that I would never be alone, as long as you lived. Before, you did what you thought was necessary for both our sakes, but I could not bear to lose you again.”

“This... What just happened...” He flinched and lost his words for a moment as her fingers found a particularly sensitive patch of skin at the base of his crest. The next words came out in a rush, desperate, as though he was afraid if he did not speak now he would never find the strength to say them. “I do not want to be an object of your pity, Delenn.”

“Pity? No.” She sat back to give him room, and let her hand trail down to his, resting her fingers on the back of his wrist. “I have felt many things toward you, in our time together. But never pity.”

“That may be, but in time--”

“Lennier.” He stopped, obedient even after all these years, and it almost made Delenn laugh with joy to see the way he pursed his lips as he had always done when he thought she was making a foolish decision. She cupped his chin in the palm of her hand, forcing him to look in her eyes, and took a slow breath to steady her thoughts before she spoke. “Do you not want this?” 

“Of course I do.” This, at least, he spoke with no doubt. A heart’s truth, as the Minbari said - one that could never be questioned. “But I knew long ago that it could never be. I have... made peace with that knowledge.”

Delenn sighed and rubbed his cheek with her thumb. He still looked so young, to her eyes - so much the naive aide she’d met years ago, forgetting that twenty-five years had passed since that day and that he was now older than she had been when she arrived on Babylon 5. He had grown and changed in his years of exile, but in some ways he was still very much the sheltered acolyte she remembered, despite the lines and scars on his face and the new peaks and ridges in his crest. 

“Many years ago,” she said softly, “it was true that this could not be. But everything that made this impossible now has changed. The humans have a saying - ‘to all things, there is a time.’” She kissed him again, softer this time, and let her fingers begin to find the clasps of his robes.

“You... I...”

“Lennier?”

“Yes?”

“Let this happen. There will be time for talk later.”

She parted his robes gently and laid her hand in the center of his sternum, a gesture half caress and half benediction, and smoothed her fingers lightly down his abdomen. It had been too long since she had been with one of her own people. She had grown accustomed to seeing Humans - to John, and to the details of his body, to David when he was a child, and to her own transformed physiology. Seeing the smooth, hairless body of a Minbari almost surprised her, now. The thin, smooth plate of bone that stood out from the center of his sternum, the flare of pale blue low on his abdomen, radiating from his already everted hemipenis... All of this seemed at once familiar and strange, and it struck her for the first time in long years how distant she had become from her own people, even while living among them. 

“Delenn... the change. Are you sure...?” 

For an instant, she didn’t understand what he meant by this embarrassed protest. Then realization dawned, and she smiled fondly at him, dropping her hand to rest on the slick, sensitive skin of the organ in question. “I do not think the differences between us are so great that we cannot find a way,” she assured him gently. And to emphasize her point, she drew him close for another kiss, her fingers never leaving his skin. When he began to undo the clasps of her robes she smiled against his lips, and helped him wordlessly when he got caught up in the more human details of her clothing. 

She would have contentedly fallen back onto the couch - none of the house staff were likely to enter her private rooms this late at night - but a moment of visible hesitation from Lennier made her tug him in the direction of her bedroom. He had perhaps doubted what this signified of his place in her life and what their relationship meant, she thought, and in any case they would be more comfortable there than on the cramped, close sofa on which neither of them would have been able to stretch out properly. 

Delenn pushed Lennier’s robes the rest of the way down his shoulders, following the fabric’s path with her lips as she encouraged him back toward the angled bed. There would be time for more proper, ritualized joinings later - tonight was about atoning for the past, and convincing Lennier that there was still room for a future. A future _here_ , for both of them together. 

* * *

The universe must have gone wrong somewhere, Lennier thought. It was impossible that he could truly be here, in this place, in this room, in this moment. Impossible that Delenn’s hands were fluttering like flame over his body, that her mouth was on his throat and her tongue... His breath hitched as her teeth scraped over delicate skin. The whole situation was impossible. It could not be. At some point, he simply must have lost his mind and fallen into madness. 

It was a beautiful delusion. 

He had dreamed of this, too many times in long and lonely nights. The first time had shamed him, woken him from sleep flushed and flustered, and left him kneeling beside his bed the rest of the night, praying for release of a very different sort, for freedom from thoughts so inappropriate to his position. Over time he’d grown used to the wrongness, a blanket of comforting and familiar sin in his exile from everything else he knew and loved. 

And yet, in his dreams, their joining had always been in a haze, as though even his sleeping mind tried to shield him from the whole of his presumption. He was spared the sin of truly knowing, truly touching, truly _feeling_ everything, even in the darkest corners of his imagination. And now that shroud lifted with the shock of blinding light let into darkness. Eyes that had before tonight seen the world by the light of a single candle now stared directly into the sun.

 _I will surely die of this pleasure. And it will be worthwhile._ The rush of feeling, of skin on skin and her voice, her hands, the tickling touch of her hair on his neck when she arched over him, was all too much to tolerate, too much to survive and too much to stop. 

“Mine,” she whispered. “Mine... you are mine,” and he agreed in a voice hoarse and heavy as though drugged. “Yours. Always, Delenn, always yours.” 

That one truth had always sustained him. In the madness of a universe overturned, it was enough to carry him past the edge of ecstasy. He found it strange, when he emerged from the haze, to find Delenn smiling at him, lazy, warm and solid against his chest. Surely the delusion should have faded by then...?

“Sleep now,” she murmured. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

In the dreams, there had never been a tomorrow to follow these moments. He wondered what a day such as that would look like, and laid awake listening to her breathe, slow and peaceful, and concentrating on the feeling of her in his arms. If the day never came again, he wanted to carry these thoughts into death and the next life beyond, to sustain him. 

In the dim light just before dawn, Delenn awoke and slipped away, soft and quiet as though afraid to wake him. He pretended to sleep, afraid she would be embarrassed or worried if she knew he had watched her all night. After a time he dressed again and went out into the house proper, and eventually found her in the garden again, exactly as he had found her on the first day he returned to Minbar. 

“For Sheridan?” he asked, and she nodded. He held out his hand again, and she took it, and kissed him softly. 

“You will stay, then?” she asked.

“If you will have me. If there is... if you have need of me. I promised you that.” 

She smiled. “I will always have need of you, Lennier.” 

In the times that came after, he wondered about this sometimes. There were servants and aides to do her bidding and to arrange her schedule, and Ivanova - Susan, as he learned to call her, when she insisted that she was retired and sick to death of hearing her patronymic - to be her friend. Sometimes when David visited, Lennier found duties and errands to excuse a long absence. Delenn’s son looked much like his father, but his eyes were Delenn’s, clear and focused, looking through to the center of his soul, and it worried Lennier deeply, at first, to wonder what the young human thought of his mother’s new companion. Over time, however, he came to see a certain symmetry in their relationship, and he thought Delenn smiled a little more when they could sit in the house all three together.

 _Three is sacred_ , he thought, and smiled at the young man whose father’s face had for so long taunted him. David smiled back, and Lennier felt a weight lift from his soul.

And between the two, Delenn rested her head on Lennier’s shoulder, clasping David’s hand lightly in hers. One for loneliness, two for possibility, and three for wholeness. The universe began to move again.


End file.
